You activate Siri on your iPhone right now by pressing and holding the home button. However, since the iPhone 8 is reportedly not going to have a physical home button, how would you activate Siri if you don’t want to wake it up with a voice command? If a new report is to be believed, the iPhone 8 power button will enable users to activate Siri.
Developer Guilherme Rambo has found references in the source code to a gesture that will activate Siri by holding the sleep/wake/power button.
This is obviously going to be an alternative to the main way that Apple will push to interact with Siri. Apple would much rather prefer that iPhone 8 owners use the “Hey Siri” callphrase to activate the digital assistant.
The power button already does a lot of things on an iPhone. It’s used to lock or wake up the device. It’s also used to power down the device. The new Emergency SOS feature in iOS 11 is also going to be linked to this button. Seems like Apple is going to add this to the list of things that the button can do on the iPhone 8.
None of this has been officially confirmed as yet so take it with a grain of salt. Apple has already confirmed its September 12th event where it will finally unveil its new iPhones officially.